MCLC: out-of-control town

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: out-of-control town
***********************************************************

Source: Foreign Policy (7/30/14):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/07/30/whats_wrong_with_chinese_t
own_sihong_suicide_attempt_cover_up

TEA LEAF NATION 
What's Wrong With this Chinese Town?
Officials in Sihong County appear out of control, and Chinese media is
starting to smell blood.
BY ALEXA OLESEN 

They worked under cover of night in early June, dumping truckloads of dirt
on the new highway and planting fast-growing soybean seeds in the thin
soil. Then they erected a sign alerting passersby to the freshly sown
crop. This wasn't some ecological initiative like urban roof gardens or
solar street lamps; it was an attempt literally to cover up a sprawling
Highway construction project. Officials in Sihong, a county of about one
million people in China's wealthy, coastal Jiangsu province, had built the
network of blacktop without a needed green light from provincial land
management authorities. (China has strict quotas
<http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/land-my-land> on how much arable land
can be converted for construction projects due to concerns about food
security and grain self-sufficiency.) Over the last week, their bumbling
efforts to cover their tracks, with a field of beans, have made them the
laughing-stock of Chinese state media and the country's Internet.

The liberal Beijing News broke
<http://www.bjnews.com.cn/news/2014/07/25/327039.html> the story on July
25, quoting a local truck driver who said he had been part of the team
hired to unload the soil. He claimed the dirt, which came from
construction sites, was dumped and bulldozed flat. The article contained
photos showing how one need only dig a half-meter hole in the soybean
field by hand before hitting asphalt. It didn't take long for the story to
spread. In a July 28 editorial, state-run People's Daily called
<http://opinion.people.com.cn/n/2014/0728/c1003-25357509.html> the scene a
farce and asked, "How do we bring the curtain down?" That same day, the
official Xinhua news service called
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/mrdx/2014-07/28/c_133514103.htm>the Sihong bean
caper "preposterous" and said the local government had incurred the
"ridicule of everyone."

Media didn't have to search long to dredge up a few precedents. The
People's Daily recalled
<http://opinion.people.com.cn/n/2014/0728/c1003-25357509.html> that
another county in Jiangsu had paid farmers to lay out straw and corn on a
construction site in 2010; another in the eastern province of Hubei laid
plastic over a concrete road and planted a vegetable garden in 2011 in
order to try to evade remote sensing technology that China has been using
since 2000 to ferret out illegal building projects. But as the story
percolated, many realized that Sihong was not only the birthplace of the
amusing bean fiasco, but also the hometown of a group of seven petitioners
who on the morning of July 16 had gathered
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/yuqing/2014-07/29/c_126808281.htm>outside the
offices of the China Youth Daily, a state-run paper, in Beijing and
swallowed pesticide. The mass suicide attempt was intended as a protest
against land seizures by officials back home. The group had tried bringing
their grievances to government officers earlier, but to no avail. Here was
a story smack at the intersection of awful and the absurd.The soybean
story gave a legitimizing cast to the pesticide protest. Prominent
Beijing-based commentator Cao Jingxing took to Weibo, China's largest
microblogging platform, to remark <http://weibo.com/1871721375/BfxX5ojP5>,
"It does not seem strange when you have a place with a government as
extraordinary as this that its people would run to Beijing and drink
pesticide on the street." As more details emerged, so too did the terrible
logic behind the Sihong petitioner's decision to drink poison. Chinese
with grievances at the local government level are allowed to bring their
petitions to Beijing for resolution. But the system, based on
centuries-old tradition, is hopelessly broken and ends in proper mediation
for only a lucky few. The Beijing News reported
<http://www.bjnews.com.cn/news/2014/07/29/327443.html> on July 29 that the
group had tried 29 times to petition the government with no result, and
that their appearance on July 16 was their third visit to the paper. It
said their dispute was linked to another construction project, also in
Sihong, that had resulted in the forced demolition of many homes.
Villagers told the paper that those who complained or refused to accept
the government's compensation deal were kidnapped from their homes and
held until they signed demolition agreements.

The picture that began to emerge of Sihong was a place of both bumbling
incompetence and vicious thuggery. Wang Xing, a criminal lawyer with the
Beijing-based Huicheng Law Firm, noted on his Weibo account
<http://weibo.com/u/1763998495> that media reports had said the Sihong
petitioners had been trying in vain for years to get the central
government's and media's attention. He wrote to his nearly 30,000
followers that it took a mass suicide attempt to "grab the attention of a
society numb to the point of necrosis." (The post was subsequently
deleted.)

The latest act in this bizarre play affords telling insight into the cycle
of bad behavior that often happens at the local government level in China.
State media said 
<http://js.people.com.cn/n/2014/0729/c358232-21807362.html> on July 28
that 14 Sihong officials had been punished for mismanaging the
construction project that had sent the seven petitioners to Beijing. The
People's Daily wrote
<http://js.people.com.cn/n/2014/0729/c358232-21807362.html> that Sihong's
Communist Party secretary was given a warning; the current and former
party secretaries of Xiangyang town in Sihong were both made to listen to
"admonishing lectures." Meanwhile, it added
<http://js.people.com.cn/n/2014/0729/c358232-21807362.html>, the
petitioners, who all survived, were criminally detained on suspicion of
"provocation." Live Nanjing, one of the Jiangsu provincial capital's main
news channels, posted
<http://weibo.com/1807431510/BfHCVozCR#_rnd1406581735040> the news on its
website, and readers who commented seemed baffled. One said
<http://weibo.com/1807431510/BfHCVozCR#_rnd1406581735040> the story made
his head spin. Another said the Chinese legal system has a long way to go.
A third said the only reason the officials were "punished" was because
they'd failed to keep the peace.